


Risen, Yet not Risen

by Tish



Series: Little Terrors - Halloween Terrorfest 2019 [10]
Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Day 10: Sometimes dead is better, Gen, Halloween Terrorfest 2019, Major Character Undeath
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-29
Updated: 2019-10-29
Packaged: 2021-01-07 21:34:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 359
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21224549
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tish/pseuds/Tish
Summary: The dead are supposed to stay dead. Commander James Fitzjames didn't get that message.





	Risen, Yet not Risen

**Author's Note:**

> Halloween Terrorfest Day 10: Sometimes, dead is better

These stories always began with the corpse suddenly sitting up with a deep gasp, eyes wide with terror.

Not this time.

This time, it was a slow awakening, as from sleep. A stirring of a still-tired body.

Fitzjames regained life still wrapped in the blanket, but without the meagre warmth it should have bought. His stockinged feet felt numb with cold, and a strange heaviness weighed on his body.

He opened his eyes to slivers of light filtering through the rocks on top of him, and he cried out, a wordless scream as he struggled to move.

Like a chick hatching, Fitzjames broke from his rocky shell, reborn, but neither dead nor alive.

_Where are my boots?_ It was odd was the mind fixated on, Fitzjames later recalled, looking around the empty landscape as he got up, shaking.

Empty.

_I died_, Fitzjames cried out to himself, his voice silent. _I died, Francis saw to it, and I was buried. I'm not Christ. I'm not risen._

Fitzjames staggered to the top of a hill and surveyed every part of the horizon, shielding his eyes from the sun. Francis and the crew were long gone, and the despair that Fitzjames felt for himself was mixed with hope for their survival.

The numbness in his feet wasn't just from the cold, he knew that somehow, he just knew that this was his new state of being. He bent down and grasped a rock, feeling it as though through heavy leather gloves. The hunger he felt was like the memory of hunger.

He wondered if he should just crawl back into his grave and wait to see what happened next, but a larger part of him wanted to walk onwards, feeling only the echo of fatigue.

_I was the best walker in the Service._

He laughed to himself, well maybe it could be true now. He could picture himself walking the last few hundred miles, his lanky figure cutting a path across the shale and down the river.

Then what?

_Sometimes, dead is better. But, then __**sometimes**__ isn't __**always**__,_ Fitzjames said to himself, hope rising within him.

Fitzjames took a step, then another. 


End file.
